Sunday drive in Dallas County, circa 1924, offers look at early car culture

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Robert W. Hart/Special Contributor

Rock Lodge's original limestone wall and fireplace can be seen from the south side of the home on Cedar Hill Avenue in what's now the East Kessler Park neighborhood. Motorists taking a Sunday tour suggested by The Dallas Morning News in 1924 were encouraged to stop by and sign the guestbook on their way back to Dallas.

Robert and Sarah Aberg proudly call the place on Cedar Hill Avenue home.

“This is the old front doorway,” said Robert Aberg, standing before a break in a 2-foot-thick wall of rock, an opening sealed and now featuring a painting of his wife. Carved stones frame the former entry. “Those are all hand-hewn.”

In the mid-1870s, Oak Cliff pioneer Sashuel A. Rush dug limestone from his land and built this hilltop house facing the village of Dallas and the Trinity River.

Electricity and plumbing brought convenience. The house added rooms, a screened porch and an outdoor dance floor, becoming a place for meetings, parties and chicken dinners.

And in 1924, the landmark was a featured stop on a Dallas Morning News drive in the country, a trek that today stretches the imagination.

A headline promised “delightful views,” calling on readers to get out there and enjoy the ride in those days before television and interstate highways. In a time before air-pollution alerts and fuel-efficiency ratings. Before gasoline prices and changing priorities sidelined the Sunday drive.

“All motorists following The News tour Sunday are requested to stop at Rock Lodge on the return trip and sign the register.”

The postwar economy was booming. Prosperity was fueling consumption. Automobiles were becoming more affordable and dependable. Roads were improving and ever-alluring — in the roaring and roving ’20s.

In autumn 1924, a gallon of gasoline cost 13 cents in Dallas ($1.71 in today’s dollars). Dozens of local car dealers sold the likes of Fords, Chevrolets, Franklins and Rickenbackers. Dallas County registered 42,000 motor vehicles in 1923-24 (roughly one for every five people), compared with last year’s 1.9 million (one for every 1.3 people).

An estimated 100,000 “automobile tourists” passed through the city in the summer of ’24. Motorcars struck Dallas streetcars seven times a day on average that year. The Dallas Automobile Club concerned itself with careless drivers, noisy cars, rough roads and traffic jams on the Houston Street Viaduct, then targeted for a streetcar route.

Tapping into the times, The News stepped up its coverage of the auto age. Advertisements presented the latest rides and products. Reports kept tabs on road closings and recounted crashes, deaths and other stories from the streets.

And as a reader service, the newspaper promoted car cruises from downtown Dallas into the great outdoors. To the likes of Irving, Grand Prairie, Richardson and Mesquite.

The newspaper reminded readers on Aug. 24, 1924, that “it is not so much the kind of car — if it’s a good one — but the fact that you own a car, that counts in added health and happiness to yourself and your family.”

That day, it pitched a 30-mile “ideal Sunday drive” from downtown through Oak Cliff to the hinterlands of Wheatland and Duncanville and back through Cockrell Hill.

The route “will be found replete in scenic and historic interest affording a long stretch of winding and shady gravel road … and an unexcelled view of the imposing Dallas skyline,” the paper informed would-be tourists.

Parts of the course no longer exist or have been named or renamed. And today’s thickets of apartments, fields of concrete and plants of industry were in the distant future when a News employee logged that trip in a Cleveland Six touring car.

Those following the lead would begin outside the newspaper’s offices, then at Lamar and Commerce streets, and cross the Trinity via the Houston Street Viaduct into Oak Cliff.

Winding through Oak Cliff, the sightseers would come to the Jimtown neighborhood, named for James Bumpas, owner of a 19th-century store and post office. They would turn south at today’s crossing of Hampton Road and Clarendon Drive, where car repair shops and a parts store now dominate the scene.

Ahead lay the Wheatland community of 100 or so residents. “The Sunday autoist will find many delightful spots and attractive scenes along the Wheatland road which is not subject to as heavy traffic as the permanently paved highways,” The News assured readers.

That stretch of what is now Hampton Road has since become a six-lane divided thoroughfare. It still crosses creeks, dipping and rising with the terrain, and passes occasional stands of trees and vacant plots of land.

Roadside landmarks such as Kiest Park, Dallas Executive Airport and a DART bus transit center weren’t on the horizon in 1924. Neither were the shopping centers, dollar stores, hair and nail salons, carwashes, banks and cleaners.

“At Wheatland the route makes a right turn onto another well graveled road running due east to Duncanville,” the tour advisory continued. Today, a fuel station, car-title loan office, fast-food restaurant and pawnshop frame the intersection.

These days, Wheatland has come down to a cemetery, a church and whatever records and memories survive. Outside the Wheatland United Methodist Church, built there in 1859, the roar of Interstate 20 now competes with the rattle of cicadas.

Onward to Duncanville — a town of some 300 people in 1930, now home to more than 38,000. Today, car dealerships, big-box retail, a hospital, office plazas, city offices and a school line the way.

For the return to Dallas, The News directed motorists on a rocky road through Cockrell Hill, reminding them to slow down for railroad tracks en route to the Fort Worth Pike, now Davis Street/State Highway 180.

Newspaper reports in 1924 told of tree plantings, fatal wrecks and the opening of the Dal-Oak Tourist Camp along what was the main Dallas-Fort Worth highway.

“Every facility for the comfort of automobile tourists is to be found at Dal-Oak,” began the caption beneath a newspaper photograph showing two sleeping huts nestled in a grove of trees.

The Dallas Automobile Club’s camp sold gasoline and goods and offered spring-fed running water, a community kitchen, a dining hall and a bath house with a swimming pool and golf course nearby. Daily fees: 50 cents per car, $1 for a hut.

There’s no trace of that scene near what’s now the intersection of Davis and Plymouth Road, about four miles southwest of downtown.

The newspaper’s tour continued east into Oak Cliff. Motorists were alerted to “watch closely for the left turn onto Cedar Hill Avenue, as possibly the most delightful part of the entire drive remains to be covered.”

A few blocks along Cedar Hill, the newspaper continued, motorists would pass “the beautiful home of R.A. Gilliam, known throughout the state for its beautiful grounds, filled with rare varieties of shrubbery and trees.”

“Fifty-five kinds of birds have been counted there in one year,” The News reported in 1947. “There are more than 3,000 different kinds of plant life in the sanctuary.”

Bob Crockett, 80, of Richardson grew up in the neighborhood and remembers roaming Gilliam’s wooded world, floating toy boats in the creek. “We considered it part of our backyard,” he recalled. “I’m pretty sure he was the guy who would chase us out.”

Gilliam’s haven was sold and divided up after his death in 1950. Some of his trees shade homes in the Kessler Lake neighborhood. His house and address, 1123 Cedar Hill Ave., no longer exist.

“After passing the Gilliam home the street continues through a heavily wooded section being developed into residential additions and then makes a sharp rise to Western Heights,” the tour report continued. “Reaching the top of the hill a first glimpse of Dallas’ imposing skyline to the east is opened to the motorist.”

Rock Lodge lay ahead, and tourists were urged to stop and sign Mrs. Louis Weil’s register before finishing the route. She had leased the Rush homestead in 1922, aiming to operate a country restaurant and tea room.

In 1933, it served as a public aid station for the Dallas County Relief Board before again becoming a private residence.

In 15 years, current residents Robert and Sarah Aberg have updated rooms, added a garden and restored some of the original five-room, two-story structure in the East Kessler Park neighborhood. The mortar of the stone walls needs ongoing repair. The stones themselves show their age, particularly when rubbed.

“Look — this is like powder,” Sarah said. “I don’t know what to do about it.”

Those walls, with their irregular stackings of stone, give the place form and a sense of fortitude. Long gone are its cupola, its winding driveway and its view of the river, whatever it was.

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